Bogota, Colombia (July 8, 2024)—Colombia-based Latin Grammy Award-winning mixing and mastering engineer Stefano Pizzaia recently installed a new pair of Amphion monitors—without first hearing a single note of music played through them.
Pizzaia’s leap of faith came six years after doing the same with his first Amphions, a pair of One15 speakers. “I said to myself, ‘If I chose Amphion once and I made the right decision without listening to the speakers at the time, I will do the same with the One25As,” he says. “I very much trust the brand.” Amphion introduced the new One25A monitor, the first 3-way design from the Finnish manufacturer, in April 2023.
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For the past 12 years, Pizzaia has worked at Audiovision Studios in Bogota while also maintaining his own mixing and mastering studio. Most recently, he has been working with artists in the pop, fusion and urban genres, and for the last couple of years, he’s typically done more mastering than mixing.
Pizzaia started out studying classical guitar in Italy, later playing electric guitar in various bands before furthering his interest in technology and electronics by switching his focus to audio engineering. Originally, he had a concentration on Colombian folk and jazz, but now works with artists across a range of modern music genres. Along the way, he has picked up five Latin Grammy Awards and a dozen or more nominations for projects by artists such as Carlos Vives, Andrés Cepeda and Jorge Celedón.
“Especially with a lot of transient information in the low end, you need a very quick, precise and responsive speaker,” he says. “You can check some things in headphones, if you have a good pair, but it’s a very different experience to listening through a good monitoring system. That’s why I needed a more complete monitoring system, because I was feeling the necessity of a complete and extended response range from my speakers.” He reports that he had been thinking about trying Amphion’s Two18s, which Audiovision Studios also has, with a BaseTwo25 bass extension system. “But when Amphion came up with the One25As, I said, ‘That’s perfect,’ because it’s a one-piece solution.”
